Three decades research in the field of business ecosystem

The study of business ecosystem is highly popular among researchers and practitioners as a new and vital stream in strategic management. From this context, systematic literature reviews emphasizing the bibliometric analysis and VOSviewer visualization of business ecosystem studies are rarely conducted. These rare studies often involve all peer-reviewed articles, due to the theme being coined until the last decade. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the bibliometric and VOSviewer visualization analyses of business ecosystem through the consideration of the following keywords, namely co-occurrence, co-authorship, citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-citation. The evaluation also encompassed the retrieval of the scientific articles published within the last three decades from the Scopus database, where “business ecosystem” was frequently found in the titles, abstracts, or author keywords. In this case, the University of Cambridge and the United States were the most prolific affiliates of publishing documents, with the National Natural Science Foundation of China highly emphasizing sponsored funding. The results obtained enabled easier determination of rarely-analyzed research themes on business ecosystem, such as the sharing and circular economy, artificial intelligence, business ecosystem platforms, and innovation ecosystem. Besides, high-reputation journals and research management decision-making were also easily determined and facilitated.